When human connection occurs in safety it allows for a valuing of vulnerability rather than its banishing. Such experiences are rare in a world shaped by the ego and all its defences. But when a work is informed by the heart and a humility of spirit then such experiences flourish. These were my thoughts as I made my way home through Soho on this damp cold early November evening. In the heart of Soho, I just had such an experience.
Some weeks earlier, I had been invited to talk to a group of men about a challenging issue associated with vulnerability. I had just ten minutes to inspire and open up the discussion. Yes, my words were appreciated but what made the evening immensely inspirational for me was the safety and containment provided by the convenor. He was firm, direct, demanding of self -responsibility and respect of each other, things that often a ‘comfort zone’ driven emphasis or a ‘chronically nice’ environment tends to avoid. What followed was an experience of shared concern and shared great valuing one to another.
The experience reminded me of Mike Ford’s ‘The Flowers of Soho’ which appeared in the journal ‘Spirituality’ shortly after the Soho bombing in 1999. It powerfully resonated with me at the time. I have always regarded Soho as my spiritual home and a more sacred place, in the true meaning of the word, than temples or cathedrals. Mike got it too and generously conveyed it in his article when he wrote;
“Soho is a place where light can shine in the darkness, where creativity can blossom in a sea of ‘craziness’. The district may have its pornographic boutiques, it’s garish advertisement. Its smell of death, but it is also an oasis of life in a desert of loneliness, where alienated people sometimes succeed in finding new friends and forming community, where strangers can meet over a meal in one of the many restaurants and (referring to the bombing) where women and men now gather in solidarity in the aftermath of violent prejudice. As one card put by a wreath put it ‘you won’t kill love’.”
Such solidarity, concerning another manifestation of human vulnerability, was again being experienced within a gathering in the heart of Soho this evening. It was indeed a testament to whoever wrote those words that tragic time ago ‘you won’t kill love’.
Mike finished the same article with a quote from Henri J M. Nouwen. For me this quote expresses all that I constantly experience about this dreadful but beautiful place and particularly experienced this November evening;
“We are not alone; beyond the differences that separate us, we share one common humanity and thus, belong to each other. The mystery of life is that we discover this human togetherness not when we are powerful and strong, but when we are vulnerable and weak”.
Some time ago, I wrote about the impact of working with someone who had committed murder and who later, whilst in the professional care of colleagues and myself, took his own life. His death, resonated powerfully with me. The man, Stefano. had certainly required me to think about him whilst he was alive and, in his death, he required me to think again. In the years that have followed I’ve needed to continue thinking. Stefano does not stand alone., There are many I meet who have tragically murdered others and then go on in equal tragedy to murder themselves. But six years ago, at the time of Stefano’s tragic death, I wrote this …. They remain my thoughts …
A week has passed in my life where outwardly no one would have noticed anything different, internally it has been a profound and disturbing time. Events have first made me think of the one person who has inspired me more than any other and who informs my daily work and thinking, Sister Sarah Clarke, known and referred to since her death in 2000 as the ‘Joan of Arc’ for Irish Prisoners.
For several years I worked with Sr. Sarah by taking care of the relatives of Irish prisoners on remand or serving sentences in the UK. It was dangerous and stigmatising work. At that time to have connection with Irish prisoners, made you suspect, marked you out. Yes, during those years I was suspect, Special Branch visited me often, they bugged my flat and banned me from every prison in the UK. It is more than ironic that in later years I now have professional access to every prison in the UK and contribute daily to the welfare and justice of many who find themselves in prison, being released from prison or just avoiding prison.
How life can change!
Within myself nothing has changed, my belief in the dignity and sacredness of the human condition remains absolutely unchanged. After almost 30 years of working with murderers, rapists, so called terrorists and the like, I am even more convinced of our sameness and humanity. In our outward manifestations of lightness, we experience a myriad of difference, in our capacity for darkness and destruction we are frighteningly similar.
So why mention all this now? Well …this week I had to face the sudden death, in custody, of someone who suffered an incredible injustice, not necessarily in relation to the crime he had been convicted of, but of societies response to what he was and to who he was, long before any crime was committed. I have been around for a long time, long enough for deaths in custody to not shock me. It is not that fact that disturbs me, what does disturb me is the related issue of justice and how the very meaning of that word has become distorted beyond recognition.
The true meaning of justice is available for all of us to see. If we raise our sight above the Old Baily, we can see the scales of justice symbolised in the very architecture of the building, we are reminded that punishment and liberty are to be held in balance. When my client died in custody this last week, this balance had been abused and therefore a true justice has been denied. Who was guilty of this injustice? Who was guilty of this crime? It does not need a trial for me to pass sentence. The guilty in this case was, and is in my thinking, the corrupt, self-serving and inhumane media. I would also pass a guilty verdict to all those that invest belief in the media without question and pass judgement without resource to the true and full facts.
When taking relatives to various prisons with Sister Sarah back in the early 80’s we were often spat upon, we got to expect it. At that time, we were often doing our work in the service of innocent men and women, the relatives and those since cleared of their convictions (the Maguire seven, the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, Judith ward, etc) But innocent or guilty, there is a dignity about the human condition that is violated when compassion and care is denied no matter what the circumstances. If the process of compassion and care is denie, then process of change, rehabilitation and reparation is also denied, in my understanding this is nothing more than a repetition of the very crime committed and is best understood by the term ‘murder of the soul’.
What made this week so very painful was the willingness of the media and those that chose to believe it’s every word, to unthinkingly enter into a joint ‘murder of the soul’ of an individual that has only featured in their daily lives as a piece of print. The murder of this soul manifested in comments, judgments and shaming, all done without any recognition of the causes and influences factors or indeed the actual facts of the case. What damning and undignified state of humanity is indicated in this unthinking and unintelligent response. It was made even worse that much of this took place when the person had died and could not offer any defence.
There is a further injustice; the vile, distorted and self-serving media has full liberty to speak out unhindered. Where those of us who know the full facts, who know the causal and influencing factors and who have shared the realities of day-to-day life are denied a voice. We are silenced and not allowed to speak out because we are required to be ‘professional’.
Yes, I remained ‘professional’ but I also wept tears of sorrow, along with other dear colleagues, for the soul who died in custody.
You won’t be surprised to know that I am left angry. I remain deeply disturbed by individuals who continue to spit in the face of a true justice by believing and acting on every word of the sensationalist press. There is always a full story and it’s seldom the one in the headlines. Until this is recognised, I guess justice and all it is supposed to be will be spat upon. The problem is when we resort to spitting, in whatever way that may manifest, then we are not thinking and to have a mind is crucial for the full and humane execution of justice.
Four years on, I could add many other stories. The injustices continue. Souls continue to be murdered. Souls continue to murder. I still occasionally get spat at …. always a sign for me to carry on and more importantly not to stop thinking. There’s. truth in the paradox of Nothing changes, nothing lasts.
I didn’t realise at the time, but for me, the impact of the disaster that unfolded at Aberfan in the 1960’s set in motion of what has been a lifelong affinity with trauma. I guess it was the first mass trauma that I was old enough to understand. The first I could identify with as I was the same age as those children killed and my school looked just like the one crushed under the mountain of coal waste.
It was also the first time I could understand the injustices that soon came to light and that had caused it. The process of cover-up, denial and collusion all adding to the trauma. I did not know at that time I would spend decades as a clinician working with injustice and trauma – for me the two have been seldom separate.
I have now, in the years that followed Aberfan, worked with many individuals caught up in trauma of different kinds from the glaringly obvious as; Kings Cross, 7/7, Admiral Duncan and also the slow. slow, slow drip by drip trauma such as the war in Ireland, the AIDS crisis and in more recent times the increasing trauma’s linked to chemsex behaviour and crime. Although my involvement has been as a clinician, trauma involves me to the very core of my being, for that’s where we tend to experienced most.
Sadly, the term ‘trauma’ has become normalised, the word is banded around with little meaning. One of the consequences for this is that an authentic experience of trauma is then minimised, it not recognised for the havoc it causes and its debilitating effects on daily life. Trauma is treatable and can be recovered from but one of the most difficult barriers to this is that because of its very nature, everyone else knows the traumatic experience is over but the person having experienced does not know this. A radical new approach is needed in how we recognise trauma and how we respond to it.
Trauma is not only an individual experience it is also a collective experience. Couples, families, groups and whole communities can share in collective trauma, even when they have not been directly involved. The very nature of trauma is that it breaks through, it disrupts and invades all that we know to be protective and safe. In this process trauma has the capacity to disconnect, to separate and cause those suffering to feel and be regarded as other. From this disconnected place new vulnerabilities evolve as, often desperate attempts, are made to seek relief and reconnect.
Trauma cannot just be overcome and worked with in the consulting room. Healing and recovery from trauma needs to take place in the community, after all this is where it happens, this is where it is lived, and this is where it can be addressed.
I tend to know, without reading any reminder, the various anniversaries of traumatic events, even when I have not been directly involved. However, I often don’t know so readily the anniversaries of individual traumas that sit in the heart’s and lives of my friends. The fact that I don’t is a tragedy in itself. Until this can be achieved, much more is needed.
I will go so far as stating that in a connected community trauma is not possible. Genuine and authentic presence of connection provides a sense of security. It is a secure experience of attachment and a knowing that we are not alone which provides without doubt resilience. Resilience won’t stop traumatic events, but it certainly enables us to be survive in the face of them.
I am reminded of two people who were at the heart of the 7/7 bombings. Gill Hicks, who died several times and had both legs amputated and Aaron, a Police Officer who walked into a carriage and witnessed the vision of hell that he would never be able to remove form his memory.
Gill describes a childhood and experiences of community that were all we would associate with secure attachment, experiences of belonging and community.
Aaron’s childhood and life had sadly been the opposite.
In response to their experiences Gill never developed or experienced symptoms of any trauma, quite the opposite, she worked to achieve and created even more experiences of safe community. Aaron withdrew and community withdrew from him. In his isolation and loneliness, he developed a full-blown traumatic response. His pain and suffering hidden for a long time took much recovery.
The experience of these two inspiring people, the experience of those in Aberfan, anniversary after anniversary, are powerful reminders of the importance of connection and community. The role we all play in enabling connection and the role we all need to play in building resilience.
I remember where I was on 9/11 – In 2001, I had the opportunity to take a one year sabbatical away from my work with prisoners and my clinical role as a forensic psychotherapist. My superiors expected me to come up with a plan of rest and self-development. But after many years of my own therapy, personal exploration, directed retreats, self-directed retreats and more. The one thing I was certain about was that I did not want to give more time to self -analysis, self-development or anything like it.
Eventually, it was agreed that for a year I would take on the role as Director for Mission Effectiveness at a large Franciscan Hospital serving not the poor but the wealthy and sometimes famous. It was totally out of my comfort zone. Put me on any prison wing in the country, put me in any segregation unit, in any probation office and sit me with the most dangerous of killers, arsonists, rapists, bank robbers or gangsters and I am totally at home, and we all get on just fine. The highly polished, sterile corridors, the perfectly decorated rooms and the state of art operating theatres, filled with wealthy and fee-paying people was something else! Despite illness, the degree of comfort and niceness in this setting was overwhelming, to the extent that it was suffocating and to the extent that it was chronic. I experienced it like drowning in a bath of the sweetest sickliest candy floss you could possibly imagine. But I was there and more, I had asked to be.
Then something happened.
9/11 happened.
Slowly but surely the horror of the twin towers, all those thousands of miles away, seeped into and broke through all that chronic comfort and niceness within that beautiful hospital. Via endless and constant television and radio news reports a different reality started to emerge. The first notice I had of this happening was when the Director of Nursing asked to see me urgently. She was not so interested in my mission effectiveness role but wanted me immediately to act in my clinical pastoral role as psychotherapist and work with her staff. Several were having panic attacks, some were being physically sick, many were crying, some inconsolable. “Whatever you do’, she said, “please stop them being so distressed”.
I responded and for the remainder of that day and the following, I debriefed, I consoled and helped create something of a perspective. Calmness, and unfortunately to my thinking, chronic niceness was also eventually restored.
I have never sought to remove distress be that my own or others. I have always worked to be with others in their distress and have always believed that, although immensely difficult, to sit with one’s own distress is by far the wisest thing to do. I had long learned that trying to push distress away just causes more conflict, more unrest, more pain and especially so when distress is the right reaction to have. The instruction I had received to ‘stop the distress’ disturbed me. I had been required to make everything ‘nice’ again and at a time when for many nothing would never be ‘nice’ again and when the continued suffering of humanity would fill our screens, newspapers and lives again and again. As I walked around the hospital in the days that followed it was like being in a parallel universe; it was as if 9/11 had not, was not, happening – silence.
I knew exactly what had disturbed me about ‘stopping the distress’ and what continued to disturb me about the chronic niceness of that hospital. It was the disavowing, the banishment and the total denial of the need we have as humans to connect with each other and to connect especially at times of suffering. Those rightly distressed nurses had connected with love and compassion, and I had colluded with an effort to get them to return to a state of disconnect and a niceness that was just not real. Those nurses had responded exactly as St Francis would have done. The whole of his ministry most surely based on connection with the world around us and with each other. In one of his hospitals, it appeared that the very heart of his mission and purpose was not being allowed, it was being forbidden.
At the centre of the hospital was an enormous publicity board, it was used to communicate the tenants of mission effectiveness and Franciscan spirituality that had long ago led to the formation of the hospital. This space, rightly or wrongly, it occurred to me was mine. In my room I gathered together the largest sheets of card I could find, I got scissors, glue and every newspaper I could find. With great care I cut out each and every image of the suffering, wounded and dying people from in and around the World Trade Centre. I fitted them together into a montage that when assembled covered every inch of that massive Mission Effectiveness board. At its very centre I pasted the picture attached to this post. The picture is of Father Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest who was chaplain to the fire fighters of NYC. On hearing the news that morning he had quickly removed his habit, put on his uniform and gone directly to be with his men and women. News footage shows him standing in one of the towers. The terror is visible on his face as his lips move silently in prayer and he prepares to minister to the injured, dead and dying. Sometime later another image is transmitted via the world’s media, it is Fr. Mychal who is carried out of the tower, his life given in the midst of unimaginable distress. By the side of this image I then pasted the prayer of St Francis.
Once in place, I stood back and looked at the finished montage, even I, its creator, was struck by its powerfulness. I was nervous, I did not know what reaction to expect. But I was equally aware that standing by the board and in view of the vision it created, I felt at home, I felt the sadness and horror it conveyed, and I felt it’s peace. I decided that’s where I would hang out. Word clearly spread and soon people from all over the hospital started to call by to look. In silence they looked, they wept, some gently touched the images, some thanked me and some went into the chapel and prayed. Some complained. The images, like Fr. Mychal, pulled no punches, it said it as it was. Humanity at its very worse and at its very best.
Humanity is seldom ‘nice’ we are, despite our intellect, primitive and awash with our needs, failings and vulnerabilities. We deny these things at great cost. When we don’t banish ours and others discomfort, when we allow ourselves to connect with our suffering and the pain of others. When we place ourselves in the way of risk, in the way of human tragedy and for the sole purpose of being together in all the shit that we ourselves so often create. Then it allows for something different to happen, for something different to be experienced.
By the time Fr. Mychal died alongside his people, he had seen terror and hell unfold on many occasions. As a gay priest in America at the height of the AIDS crisis he had held and kissed many who in the last days of their lives had been totally rejected by all around them. He had voiced and celebrated the joys of his and their sexuality and invited parents to be proud of their dying sons. No other voice in our world ever did this at that time.
The horror of 9/11 and the horror of the AIDS crisis are of course over but there will new horrors and some of us I guess will need to face such this very day. May we be able to meet whatever horror visits us as Mychal encouraged us to do so by how he was in the world – present, connected, vulnerable, flawed (as he often reminded us) but still willing to love. Father Mychal pray for us …
Twice, in as many days, the image of the joyous Christmas herald angels formed in my mind since early childhood has been challenged. First, when reading one of John O’Donohue’s poems this line jumped out of the page right at me “May the Angel of Justice disturb you to take the side of the poor and the wronged”. Then whilst listening to the wireless programme ‘A Yellow Light’, in which Nadin Ednan Laperouse recounts the traumatic death of his daughter Natasha from a severe allergic reaction after eating a sandwich. As his 14-year-old daughter lay dying in his arms he described vividly seeing several angel figures approaching and standing around her. Disturbed by their presence he tried to brush them away.
Both of these incidents reveal, that like many other of life mysteries, angels too are mysteries of paradox. As well as brining glad tidings their task would also appear to be to cause disturbance.
When disturbance manifest in our lives we tend not to like it. But what about being the one who causes disturbance, being the one who disturbs. What is it like to be that person? I’m no angel but I’ve been reminded on many occasions that I disturb people, some even pay for me to do just that. The hope of many is that a therapist will become their guardian, their salvation and their ‘bringer of good news’. Quite a shock then when I, as a therapist, view my task as absolutely not to do that. For what point would there be if such powerful ability was to reside in me? For the other, nothing would change.
It’s not unusual for someone at the start of a therapeutic process for them to ask what they should do? My response is always; be curious and be prepared to step out of any comfort zone. Some never return after this response, I guess it is they that recognise that I am offering an invitation, an expectation that they become disturbed.
Being a person who disturbs means being willing to be disturbed myself and to live my life often in the place of paradox. This often, uncomfortable place requires the willingness to recognise and then bring together the total and often extreme manifestations of the human condition within myself and within others. In practice, it means being able to hold in mind and value every version possible of the polar opposites that we all possess. It means naming them, calling them out, exposing them and placing them where they can be considered and where we can have a mind in relation to them. Love them even.
As a forensic psychotherapist and working in forensic settings this task is not as difficult as it may seem. There’s little illusion, or collusion actually, amongst those who have little reason to deny any more. I often encounter greater honesty and genuine connection on the inside of the prison gate than ever I do on ‘the out’. No, the challenge is found within other connection, relationships, friendships and of course within myself.
Being that person who causes disturbance is not formed or restricted to a job description or professional role, it is formed in the heart of life’s authentic experiences and cannot be turned on or off at choice.
Being that person who disturbs is also not limited to ‘what I do’, it’s also not about ‘what I am’ but more about who I am. This is in fact the essence of what some (and I) refer to as vocation. Vocation emerges as a way of being in the world in response to an internal ‘yes’ said to all of life and as it is represented. The occasion of me having that realisation and saying that ‘yes’ is another story and for another time. Enough to say perhaps that I’ve learned saying ‘yes’ is an ongoing requirement throughout life.
Vocation is, for want of a better explanation, all about saying ‘yes’ to paradox and accepting a way of being in the world without the need for denial, collusion or pretence. Owning this position, being willing to live it is what in psychology is referred to as living the authentic real self. If ever there was a purpose to any therapeutic process, it is this. If ever there was a time when this was required, it is most surely now.
Being that person who disturbs is, I have come to appreciate, one of the consequences of vocation, of saying ‘yes’ to life. Being the person who disturbs means saying “yes’ to the wholeness of life – light and dark. For one without the other, is no life at all. Being that person who disturbs means saying ‘yes’ to life not just once but over and again and again and again.
Saying ‘yes’ to life is the vocation we are all called to. Just how that gets played out for each of us will, for certain, hold many challenges. Whatever your place of authenticity is and whatever my place, we will each often find ourselves being an angel to others and always in need for one or more of those cherubs ourselves.
My experience of ‘the sacred’ in life has not been found in the cathedrals, monasteries, friaries or parishes of the institutional church but most vividly, tangibly, in places more readily associated with darkness, mess, brokenness, pain and horror. Let me say this more directly; the prison landings, police and court cells in which much of my work takes place are the places where I often witness more compassion, concern and humanity than I ever have in the chronically nice religious institutions that also feature in my life.
On Religious Brothers Day, I as a Franciscan Brother and my fellow brothers working in sites of suffering across the world, celebrate the paradox of our place in the world and in so doing I recall an incident, a horror, that unfolded on London Bridge some years ago now.
Time and time again life, if we live it fully (for me living life as a religious Brother enables me to do just that) takes us into the uncomfortable territory of paradox. The point in the human condition where opposites come together and demand of us that we think outside of our comfort zones and with new perspectives. No matter how many times we are called into this process it never seems to become any easier.
For more than three decades now, my daily work has provided me with this challenge. I work as a forensic psychotherapist within the criminal justice system across the London prisons and probation service. At the heart of forensic psychotherapy is the belief that all offences are a symbolic communication of something that cannot be said and that no one is ever just their offence. It is these tenets that I embrace when advising courts, parole boards and police investigations on risk, dangerousness and suitability for treatment.
In the context of my work, I have met many hundreds of men and women each presenting me with their own unique version of the paradox and in particular the paradox that sits at the heart of that which we would consider ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘evil’ or ‘mad’. I am forever grateful to the men and women who consume my daily thinking and in so doing constantly challenge me to go beyond myself. Repeatedly, it is they who take me into the heart of the experience of the passion and at the end of the day the only certainty I come away with is that it is never clear cut. It is always paradox.
Paradox in the criminal justice setting is always hidden from public view. My work takes place in a separated, secret world. That fact alone acts as a constant reminder that I am connected to much that many do not want to think about. It is the stuff of life considered only on partial terms by a polarised media or distorted beyond recognition by the latest Netflix crime drama. It is also a world where there is much history of the crucifixions of life. Where contemporary versions of the passion are repeated and often with little evidence of any resurrection. I could cite many examples that would enable me to share my work but none quite like that which occurred in the winter of 2019. A major incident on London Bridge propelled not only the paradoxes of criminal justice into the wider public’s thinking but also, and with little recognition of course, the very Franciscan themes of forgiveness, wholeness and redemption.
The incident I refer to unfolded at a conference on rehabilitation. A radicalised young man launched a knife attack on two of those attending and killed them. As the violence continued it spilled out onto the bridge and others from the conference became involved.
In the media coverage that followed, two men were brought to our attention, both are deserving of our continued reflection. One is a man previously convicted of murder who, caught up in a new drama acts to save and preserve life. The other, a man who has committed his young life to helping change and rehabilitate similar offenders and who then loses his life at the hands of one he may well have sought to serve. In the days that followed, the media found many words to express a response in relation to the later. But their struggle to find the language that could comprehend that someone serving a life sentence for murder could also be equally involved in the preservation and saving of lives was only too apparent.
In this example, it seems that extreme events are never really as extreme as we need them to be. We prefer ‘extreme’ to mystery. We know what to do with ‘extreme’. We make it ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and our small, limited mind can then cope. What our thinking struggles most with is the reality and fact of wholeness. The fact that someone, that we, are forever a sacred mix of all that we easily label ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and that the resultant manifest wholeness is for the most not extreme at all. My understanding as a clinician of faith tells me that wholeness is not one or the other, it is always both. It is always a paradox.
The events on London Bridge made public the reality of the paradox within the human condition. For once, the very private world that I inhabit was revealed. Something more occurred, something more got played out for all to see and that something seriously is demanding more than our conditioned view of our world and each other. It is demanding we think beyond the initial superficial reaction and not be so afraid of ourselves and the mystery of what wholeness really looks like. Because wholeness is much more than we care to think about.
Wholeness also requires us to think about the third man who featured on the bridge that day. For it is he that brings into sharp focus the reality that none of us are ever a reduced to one dimension. We are all that incredible mystery of immense light, immense dark and many dimensions. At that moment in time, it is the third man who manifests the part of him capable of ultimate destructive behaviour. But, like it or not, that destructive moment is exactly just that, a moment. It is not the full picture and is certainly not the full reality or extent of who he is.
The third man was once a babe in arms, just the same as the other two men. He will have also travelled through life being attached to and loved by others. Being seen and known for many things worthy of praise and respect and nothing like the part of him now witnessed by the world. He too, just like the rest of us, was a manifest paradox in much need of a manifest passion.
Br Stephen Morris fcc
(This article was first published in ‘Passio’ Lent 2021. Br. Stephen Morris is a consecrated member of the Franciscan Companions of the Cross and works for HM Prison & Probation Service in the UK)
“Get your fucking arse in here NOW!” or to be more precise “What part of get your fucking arse in here NOW”, don’t you understand?” When you’ve tried everything in the book to prevent someone one from going into prison and they are still not getting it, this is the kind of desperate instruction that you resort to … well … it’s the level of desperation I’ve been known to resort to.
As I bellowed my frustration into the telephone and not for the first-time fellow officers would look up from their desks and mouth “Are you Ok? With the passing of time eventually they would just mouth “Nick!” confident in the knowledge that it would be this particular young man who once again had pushed me to the limit.
Nearly always, about an hour later, Nick would turn up for his appointment, off his face usually on GHB and often looking as battered as the bicycle he would have negotiated the Elephant & Castle roundabout with. Once I’d assessed the potential of him going unconscious, we would then go to a local greasy spoon. For an hour or more, Nick would talk, and I would listen. At the end I would always give him a hug and thank him for coming and for talking to me. I never breached him and Nick never went to prison.
Seven years have passed since listening to Nick and the very early days of developing the criminal justice response to chemsex crime. In those early years the streets, gay bars, sexual health clinics, drug clinics, café’s other gay venues of Soho became my office. With only a handful of men convicted of crimes that had taken place in a chemsex context, it was possible to spend many hours with those men. Taking them to appointments and introducing them to services. Perfect opportunities to listen.
Over two years I did very little else with that small cohort of men but listen. I listened. In doing so, I slowly became aware that I was hearing immense stories of personal tragedy and a depth of heart-breaking trauma I’d seldom heard before. People don’t need much to tell their story. They basically need a witness and I guess that’s what for those men I had become. All the stories I heard have stayed with me, they taught me much. Nick’s story and how he told me however, I will never forget.
On a winter afternoon, I had agreed to meet Nick and go with him to his Dean Street clinic appointment. It had been, as usual, a long wait standing outside Boots on Piccadilly Circus. There had been the usual many calls to my mobile, ‘I’m on a bus’, ‘I don’t know where I am’, ‘I don’t know what direction its going in’ – “what can you see?’ ‘I can see that fucking big clock ‘ – ‘you can see Big Ben’ – ‘yes that’s it ‘ – is it in front of you or behind you?’ – ‘ I don’t know” ‘ How much G have you taken?’ ‘Fucking loads’ …. I don’t know how I did it, but I would always wait, and Nick would always turn up and usually dance his way towards me. People under the influence of G can look as if their dancing – they’re not! We would get something to eat, and slowly the effect of the G would diminish, Nick would start to talk, become more conscious, stop ‘dancing’ and then we would make our way to the clinic, or the Antidote drop in.
I would wait outside to make sure he stayed and then I would see him home. We did this for weeks and eventually he was able to meet me sober. Each week he would talk and tell me, in graphic detail about the previous weeks chemsex activity, what his latest Grindr hook-ups had involved, what had happened at the last chillout and how he had not slept for 3 days. Reality and paranoid delusion all mixed in.
Then, on one occasion, another wet cold afternoon in Soho, he said he wanted to show me something. He took me away from Dean Street, off Old Compton Street and down to the theatre that never closed in the war. He took me behind the theatre into a dark long ally one of the many that crisscross Soho and which the tourists never see.
There were puddles and the suffocating smell told me they were puddles of piss both human and rat I imagine. Also, alongside much rubbish the discarded condoms stood out. It was all but silent. ‘Look’ he said ‘Look’. He checked to make sure I was looking then he looked at me and said, ‘Steve, this is where it all began’.
By this time, I had learned enough about Nick’s life to know exactly what he was referring to. How old were you, Nick? When you first came here? I asked. ‘I was brought here’ he said, ‘when I was 12’. They brought me every day.
Nick’s story was in fact all too familiar, over time I heard it again and again from different men and in slightly different versions, but all with the same ending. The same consequence. An experience of sex as abusive, exploitative, and as hideous as the setting of the piss-stained alleyways of Soho.
Such a context of sexual experience is powerful in affect, in its secrecy and in its hiddenness. It gives messages about your sense of self, your identity and who you are at your core. It makes you other, less than, unworthy, a failure, an embarrassment, a disgrace. It tells you and teaches you a belief that what you do is shameful and that you are shame.
This internal litany of self-denigration was writ large in Nicks thinking, it dictated how he was himself and how he thought about himself and how he believed others thought about him. When Nick said ‘this is where it all began’ he was revealing to me, explaining to me, letting me know in his way that that this is where his journey into shame and many other things that could not be spoken of began.
Of course, it’s not only sexual exploitation that ends in shame. Any experience that makes you think and feel that you are ‘damaged goods’ has the same consequences and especially when it’s attached to not only what you do but to who you are. I’ve listened now to many hundreds of stories of shame and equally in number of the attempts, creative and destructive, to ameliorate such pain.
It’s not unusual for me to be asked by other criminal justice professionals how do I get people to tell me their stories? It saddens be greatly that there is a need for them to ask. But in a public service culture where success is measured by a tick box way of thinking, more and more ask this question. Even more tragic is that many appear not to understand my answer. What have we become? is a much-needed question.
In responding to the question, my answer is the same as the one given by Sr Elaine Roulette who founded a Jesuit outreach service for the poor. When asked, “How do you work with the poor?” She answered, “You don’t. You share your life with the poor.” It’s as basic as crying together. It’s about “casting your lot” before it ever becomes “changing their lot”. Whatever ‘the lot’ we are witnessing, poverty, shame or both then the task is to meet it with our very self. With the willingness to see the shared humanity in ‘the lot’ we all hold… albeit in different ways.
When ‘the lot’ is shame, then Nick and the other men did not need me to tell them about my shame (and I’ve plenty). What they needed was me to witness it and crucially remained connected to them. Connection enabled me to aligned myself with them and did not affirm their shame by rejecting them or indeed minimising shames presence. The antidotes for poverty are many. The antidote for shame solely one thing. Connection. I would say even more clearly, unconditional connection.
Connection requires very little. An authentic willingness to be present is what enables it. The ‘cop out’ I often hear from professionals is usually “I don’t have time” implying that connection can only be experienced after building a relationship. Not true. Connection is a communication of the human spirit and when allowed for, when given permission, is instant. It depends on our willingness to be human rather than hiding behind the mask or illusion of being ‘professional’, or only doing the things that enable us to tick the ‘success’ box.
“I died of shame” people say. I’ve come to know that people do quite literally die of shame. Failing to connect, withholding connection because a tick box culture does not allow for it, does not value it and, it would seem does not teach it, has deadly, deadly, deadly consequences.
Let’s be clear. In the case of the lasting effect of sexual predators and others who exploit in a myriad of ways, the tick box culture finishes off what they started. Since starting this work, a line from a Rosie Hardman song has constantly come into my mind, ‘It happens all the time – you see young men die.’ I know it to be a tragic truth.
Equally, I know only too well that the roots of shame run deep. Indeed, for more than I would have ever imagined. Connection can come too late. I’ve learned painfully that even when you think that progress has been made shame can still hold the capacity to kill. Accidental, suspicious, and intentional death all feature highly within the cohort of men I work with. Each one of these deaths exposes, evidences, what a failure the success target driven ‘tick box’ culture is. How could it not be anything else. At its core it is deeply inhumane.
I’m not beyond conducting welfare checks on those I worked with sometimes even years and years later. It gives a powerful message of valuing, and no tick box culture regulation will stop me from valuing. Last summer, having not seen or heard anything of Nick, my welfare check revealed that he had been found dead. Nick was 34.
It was a sad realisation indeed to acknowledge that despite everything, Nick had always turned up for me. It was me that, had at the end of the day, arrived too late for him.
At this time of year, the river that runs close to where I live often becomes a raging torrent. I love it and walk by the side it more often than in the summer when it is rather still and boring. A few days ago, I as I walked by its raging side, just in front of me a woman with a young child, no more than three years old, was doing the same. At some point she became distracted, reached into her bag, pulled out her phone, started talking to someone and at the same time started rummaging around in her bag. As I passed them, the child wandered off. The women seemingly oblivious. I wondered if the women would notice that the child had wandered and looked back just in time to see the child step into the violently turbulent river. The child immediately disappeared beneath its raging surface. Gone.
The child had gone! I stood still and watched the mother as she put her phone away and started to look for the child but strangely without looking into the river. I turned and carried on my walk. I found myself wondering at what stage would the mother realise? Grinning, in fact laughing to myself, I decided not to tell her. I continued walking……
It was my laughter that eventually woke me from this dream. As often so in the aftermath of a vivid dream, I found myself wondering and thinking as if the event had really occurred. For quite some time the images did not diminish from my mind. What would I have done in the hours, days, weeks, months, years knowing that I had not acted to warn the women? to rescue the child? and to not tell the mother the truth of what I had witnessed? How would have I lived with myself? was the question I was the overriding question I was left with.
Our prisons are full of people who live, often across decades, asking themselves the very same question. They who have taken a life by murder. They who, in a moment of time, have killed, often with much less sadism than I in my dream. All face the challenge of needing to continue to live life and live with themselves. For them it’s not a dream.
With exception to the few psychopathic personalities, most men and women who have murdered, as well as the need to talk about having to live with themselves, they are also eager to let me know that prior to their deadly act, they have held a view of themselves as someone not capable of murder. Indeed, so shocked and horrified by their own actions are they that many develop an authentic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The trauma of the murderer is seldom recognised. The traumatised killer is yet another paradox of the human condition. It is a paradox that confronts all of us who work with those deemed mad, bad, or sad. In real life, as well in the arts, these extremes of paradox do not sit in isolation. Fred West was described by many of his neighbours as a friendly soul willing to do anything for you. Beverley Allitt a dedicated caring nurse. Mary Bell blossomed into a successful loving mother. Paul Spector a popular bereavement counsellor. Steven Gallant, convicted of murder himself, wrestled another murderer to the ground on London Bridge, saving other lives. Each one reminding us again and again that no one is just their offence.
Last week I visited the Southbank Centre to view the Koestler Arts Exhibition ‘Freedom’. As ever it declares though outstanding creativity its annual message of the same truth; no one is ever just their offence. Lining the walls of the exhibition for the last fifteen years have been literally hundreds of stunning works of art all created by those in our prisons. The paradoxes if you will of the human condition. Their artwork alone also revealing exactly that.
But those isolated in prison do not in fact exist in isolation. As evidenced in my dream, we all exist with them. We may not be in prison, but we are in, part of, the same human condition. My dream is evidence of that. My unconscious ability to be callous, to turn away and to sadistically enjoy doing so, was not in consciousness acted out but those human abilities were as much part of my mind as those who at a specific moment in time have done just that.
My dream caused me concern, caused me unrest, removed me from my comfort zone about myself. It was a powerful reminder that within me lies the capacity to be all I would rather not be. Life, professional and otherwise, has taught me not to believe so readily those who righteously claim that they could never kill. I’m not seduced by this denial of the primitive capacity we all innately hold. No, just like; Fred, Bev, Mary, Paul, Steven and the Stephen who dreams, we all, given the right conditions, can suddenly find we no longer have resource to our righteous mind or indeed any mind at all.
For me as a clinician, I view the criminal act as a consequence of a state of mind, full of conscious and unconscious material, all holding meaning. The ‘thought crimes’ of Orwell, the New Testament ‘adultery of the heart’, the ‘secret thoughts of the heart’ referred to by Sir Edward Coke, may not have a place in law, but in the human condition they are all incredibly present without exception.
The unexamined life is not only not worth living, but it is also highly dangerous. The invitation of the exhibition, like the invitation of my dream is for us all to have a mind. To hold in consciousness our own callous and murderous abilities. For if we, if I can do this, the killer within won’t need to kill!
I’m a witness to brokenness most days of the week, we all are if we are willing to see. But seeing can be hard and occasionally deeply painful. It was exactly that earlier this week.
A 22-year told man; Ricky (not his real name) attacked staff at his probation office. He, a few days earlier, whilst sectioned had attacked a nurse. The reason for his sectioning a few days before, he had attacked his mother and not for the first time. In his young life none of this was for the first time.
Alongside his external attacking are also many repeated incidents of Ricky attacking himself. Consuming massive amounts of alcohol to the point of blackout. Making himself available to predatory men on Grindr who render him unconscious with GHB. Incidents of him being sexually assault, raped and the filming of him without consent. The repeated cycle of not eating, not sleeping, threats and attempts to kill himself.
All the above was playing out over just three days this week. Alongside all of this was the exceptional compassion and skilled risk management of his probation officer and his specialist police officer. Over three days from morning and often throughout the night hours they worked ceaselessly to restore safety to protect Ricky and to protect the public. Despite their extraordinary efforts this week, it did not work.
In their desperation they repeatedly approached community mental health services, who turned away. They repeatedly approached A&E departments, who turned away. They repeatedly approached the court, who turned away. They repeatedly approached the psychiatric hospital, who turned away. They repeatedly approached housing services, who turned away. No one would section Ricky. No one would admit him to hospital. No one would take him into custody and when a professionals meeting was convened with urgent instructions for all to attend, mental health providers did not turn up.
At one point Ricky too was approaching A&E departments across London, begging his officers to get him into prison or to get him Sectioned. After three days a A&E Consultant admitted him but only for a short time. It was long enough however for a crisis housing worker to go to meet him and take him to emergency accommodation.
The last contact I had at this point was to read the consultants account which described Ricky as wandering into A&E reception almost on the point of collapse, bleeding and having soiled himself.
In all of this, and believe me it is not unfamiliar territory, what stayed with me was the fact that this immensely vulnerable and dangerous 22-year-old had shit himself. All the turning away, all the failure to contain, all the lack of willingness to recognise what was being communicated, all the failure to respond had resulted in such a stripping away of dignity, to the point where even Ricky’s shit could no longer be contained. The level of brokenness broke my heart and like Ricky’s own heart, I guess my heart is still breaking.
Parallel to all of this, other parts of my life were continuing. At some point I received a message. The message was simple “I’ve just completed a home visit and noticed the child has a wound on his head”. Later my social work friend and I discussed this experience in depth, we needed to. Because like Ricky’s shit stayed in my mind, the wound of this child stayed in the mind of my social work friend. This is what witnessing brokenness does.
I won’t bore you with all the professional ongoing responses that continue to unfold for both Ricky and the child. But in all of this, where are we to find hope? How can we hold onto hope? What is to become of hope?
In the last meeting about Ricky, I raised that very question on behalf of him really. “What can we do” I asked, “to ensure that Ricky has something to hope for”. It seemed an impossible question, but we managed to answer it. The worker from the LGBT organisation, we had previously been trying to link Ricky with, agreed to give him a phone call. A call that would let Ricky know he was being thought about that he mattered, that he had not been forgotten. In this very complex broken place, it was the one simple glimmer of light, the one hope.
The phone call, it was agreed, would not be a piece of work, it would not be an assessment. It would simply be a message of connection. Amidst all the inhumanity of rejection, all the repeated turning away. This simple phone call would offer a glimmer of light, I absolutely believe beyond any doubt that this act alone, provided a mirror for Ricky of his own essential goodness. It said to him that he is not defined by the worst of all he has done, or indeed by the worst that has been done to him.
Ricky, like every person I’ve ever spoken with within criminal justice settings has experienced a tragedy at some pivotal moment in their life. Every one of them was denied love and affection from a mum, a dad, their grandparents, an uncle, or someone else who they should have been able to depend on. I’ve come to learn in my work, in the many Ricky experiences I have witnessed, that every human tragedy stems from a person being denied real love at some fundamental point in their life.
Every person deserves to hear the words, “You matter; You are loved,” and to experience the this not only in words but in actions. We must not only witness the brokenness around us, but we must also act. Our actions must be about affirming the dignity of those who feel lost, forgotten, thrown out, and abandoned. Yes, on occasions this will also mean to clean up their shit and attend to their wounds.
Ricky’s brokenness started very early in his life. I know this because in his file there is a note written all those years ago by his social worker, “I’ve just completed a home visit and noticed the child has a wound on his head”.
Life sometimes puts us on the floor. Loss, grief and all that scares us does this to us and sometimes often. Such experiences run contrary to much of contemporary conditioning which implicitly and explicitly buys us into the delusion that life is only worth the living if it is lived on the heights of happiness and as far from the floor as humanly possible. Anything different must be banished. Not allowed. Christmas time it seems is when this delusion is at its most pronounced, when the need to comply is writ large in expectation of all kinds.
The version of Christmas responsible for such delusion is no respecter of the realities of life. The being rendered to the floor experiences of life do not of course comply with any calendar and they certainly don’t wait until we’re ready. As we discover, usually over time, there are many life events that we can never be prepared for. Life is not always of our choosing.
But the one-dimensional that would have us wedded to life as a constant mountain top experience need not be so total and can, if we allow, become more expansive, more whole. The indicators of this possibility are hard wired into this season, if only we would see. For Christmas does most certainly not take place solely on the mountain top. Christmas also occurs when darkness is almost total. When the deadliness of winter is at its midpoint. When the earth is at its most silent and its nighttime longer than the day. It is these aspects of Christmas and indeed of life that have had their value conditioned out of us. But valuable they are, especially so in preparing us for life’s encounters with the floor.
When life puts us on the floor, our task is not in fact to immediately get up or expect to be able to when to do so is asking the impossible. No, our task is to allow whatever that experience is. To allow it to pass through us and for us to pass through it. Anything other than this, no matter how seemingly appealing, will hold an often-tragic high cost.
The lowliness of Christmas is a reminder that life is not all mountain top experiences. Throughout our lives, as the seasons of darkness and winter come and go, they invite us to surrender our delusions and go to the places that so often scare us. They invite us to consider what we would rather not know but what so often must be.
Thomas Merton writes beautifully about this when he says, ‘how great is our need for places of silence and solitude’. He says, ‘let there always be quiet, dark places in which people can take refuge. Places where they can kneel in silence’. Merton also spoke of the precious silence of nighttime. He said, ‘I live in the woods out of necessity. I get out of bed in the middle of the night because it is imperative that I hear the silence of the night alone, and, with my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the silence of the night’.
When, as a very young man, I first took the vows of Franciscan religious life, like all those Priests, Sisters, Brothers who had gone before, I prostrated myself with my whole body on a cold unwelcoming floor before the Blessed Sacrament. What that meant to me then is very different to what it means to me now. Like Merton, I still rise in the night and press my face to floor. Not for any piety’s sake but because life, not vows, have taught me this is where I know, this is where I encounter all that is more than me. It is the place, the moment where I let go of delusion again and again and where I confront the realities of myself and our world I inhabit. It does not free me of the pains of life but rather, relates me to them. Surrendering to the floor does not provide me answers to the cruel mysteries of life, but rather joins me with them. Surrendering to the floor even when like the psalmist, I’m not done with ranting and raving, then and only then do I experience something different, something that the world cannot give or take away …. Some would call it peace.
